“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) 1922-2008 French agricultural engineer, filmmaker and writer
“Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.”
The Florence King Reader (1995)
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Florence King9
American writer 1936–2016Related quotes
“I always say that I’m a writer who writes more from place than race.”
Katori Hall (1981) American playwright
On the theme that she most explores in “Art Talk with Playwright Katori Hall” https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2015/art-talk-playwright-katori-hall (National Endowment of the Arts; 2015 May 28)
“Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.”
James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat
Speech at the banquet for Grand Duke Alexis, 11 November 1871 at the Revere House Hotel in Boston, p. 102 books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=YRmn-_vXZ58C&pg=PA102&dq=persuaded <br class="br">Cf. George Eliot 1879: Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact
“A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.”
Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 405
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct. <br class="br">" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931) <br class="br">General sources
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
Variant: Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Context: Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.
Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) American actress
"I want everything" in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108
Context: The cynic says "blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." I say "blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he can't always be disappointed."
Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic
Source: Speedboat